Linux Beats Windows To Become The Most Popular Development Platform: Stack Overflow Survey 2018

Every year, Stack Overflow conducts its developer survey and shares its results with the public for analysis. Expanding its reach, this year over 100,000 developers took part in the 30-minute survey and told how they learn new technologies, which tools they use to get their work done, and what they look for while hunting some job.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing the different findings of the survey with you and telling you how it compares to the past years’ trends. Today, I’ll be telling you about the platforms that were most commonly used by the developers over the past year.

The most popular development platform

If you look at this year’s data, you’ll notice that 48.3% developers responded with Linux as the platform they have done development work for this year. It was followed by Windows Desktop and Server with 35.4%.

The platforms that follow these top two are Android, AWS, macOS, Raspberry Pi, WordPress, and iOS.

Source: Stack Overflow

Please note that you shouldn’t confuse the most popular coding platform with the operating systems preferred by developers. In that case, Windows still leads that tally with about 50% share. Rest 50% is divided uniformly between Linux and macOS. In case you’re planning to install Linux on your main machine for development work, you can read some top coding distro recommendations.

Linux also topped the list of the most loved platforms to work for, followed by serverless infrastructure and AWS.

Another interesting data that came up was related to their work setup. To get their work done, about 70% developers use two or more monitors on their main workstation. Moreover, about 3% devs use 4 or more monitor setup.